The Eyeball Mural

Here is a lovely performance of the Henry Purcell piece:

I had skimmed that thread, and managed to overlook what was right under my nose. Thank you kindly for pointing me in the right direction!

I love Thunder Castle, especially the music. I've been trying to discover the origins of all the tunes in the game, and I'm still having trouble with a couple of them. I count nine musical events in the game, and I've identified seven of those pieces of music. I am still researching the following: - Power-up music for the castle maze / wizard level - Victory fanfare (same for all mazes / levels) (plays when the last guardian is slain and the level is completed) Does anyone have any ideas about these last two pieces of music?

I'd like to see the needlepoint design. I may have to acquire the book just for that... can't seem to find any scans online.

Thank you! I thought maybe I read about that on one of the sample pages from your book, but I couldn't track the info down. By the way, I'm buying the deluxe edition for myself and two regular editions as gifts.

Tim, can you tell me who did the box art and instruction manual art for Berzerk on the 2600 VCS?

That I would love.

Ah ha! A fellow "old-timer!" Thank you very much, glad you enjoy it. I would enjoy hearing your memories and stories about the game. In addition to many hours of solo play from 1984 until today, I used to play co-op with friends in the 1980's. We would alternate levels, taking turns exploring and battling, and consulting each other about strategies as we went down into the depths. One person would be the active player while the other would observe and comment. Usually a big pile of junk food sat between us, and we would joke and ponder and munch snacks while we played all evening and into the morning. I've seen claims that Treasure of Tarmin was the first "corridor shooter." I don't know if that's true or not, but I can attest that it must be among the first "jump scare" games. After several minutes of quiet gameplay with very little in the way of sound, getting attacked from the side by a previously-unseen monster (with the snarling roar that accompanies the attack) startles me as much today as it did decades ago!

Maybe I have missed the answer to this question. I've looked through the old threads about who did Atari 2600 box artwork, and of course the Art of Atari book thread (which will answer most of the questions anyone has ever had about Atari's art and artists), but does anyone know who created the box art for the first wave of Activision games for the Atari 2600? I'm asking about the artworks with the bold and simplistic line art, the bright solid colors, the rainbow motion stripes, etc. Perhaps they were the work of a single artist, or perhaps the style was art-directed with multiple artists employed. Do we know who did the art, who was art director or packaging designer, who designed the Activision logo, etc.? The only bit of knowledge I have is that the typeface used on those designs looks to be Futura Bold (or some similar weight of Futura). Any info, or pointers to existing forum threads or external sources of information, is very appreciated!

Notes on the magical doors (enchanted doors or possessed doors), and the Special Books they protect: THE POSSESSED DOORS & THEIR SPECIAL BOOKS There are in the Tarmin dungeon some rather mysterious and frightening special doors. The instruction manual refers to them as "other doors... endowed with weird powers." The manual warns that the player may encounter "a door that behaves strangely because of an ominous spell." These special fighting doors or magical doors are not blue like normal doors, nor do they blend in to the wall segments like hidden doors. They glow eerily with supernatural power, blocking the player's way and permitting no passage. If attacked a magical door will fight back, often with magnificent strength. The doors can be retreated from, or placated with a container of treasure, like all the other monsters in the game, but if defeated will give up the game's second-most most precious treasure and arguably most useful items: the Special Books. These Special Books are tomes that resemble the weapon books, war books and spiritual books, but which are distinguished by an "x" or "arrowheads" motif on their covers, and by their permanence: they never break (unlike the weapon books) and are not consumable (unlike the "power up" war books and spiritual books). These books offer mighty powers to their bearer. The Vision Book allows the player to see through the dungeon walls and the closed doors; the Teleport Book allows the player to move grid square by grid square without walking, and facilitates unimpeded movement through walls or closed doors; and the Midas Book alchemically transmutes all metals to platinum, the most desirable and advantageous metal in the game. The magical doors that guard these books can appear on any dungeon level (of any nature or aspect), but are usually encountered as the player moves deep underground. They seem to be generated by the program in much the same way as all the other monsters and treasures. There can be multiple iterations of these doors in a maze layout, even in the same map tile. It is not unheard of to encounter two or three of these doors adjacent to one another in consecutive grid squares, but usually, especially in the more difficult game versions, they are few and far between, making their treasures even more valuable due to scarcity. The special doors come in three colors: tan, light blue and golden yellow. There is no correlation between a door's color and the nature of the maze it appears in. All varieties of magical door can appear in any maze layout, on any level. The door colors do correspond to the treasure that each variety of door safeguards. Tan doors guard the pink Vision Book; light blue doors guard the light blue Teleport Book; and golden yellow doors guard the purple Midas Book. The possessed doors only hang on the walls of 1 x 1 rooms. In other words, each evil door opens into a one-grid-square room only, and never a larger room. The doors protect the identity of the monster (or whatever) that lurks beyond, so there is no way to spy one of these mystery monsters by entering the room behind or beside it. The Vision Book is no help in seeing this bit of unseen evil. All that is seen when the Vision Book's spell is in effect is identical glowing door faces on each side of the room cube: like all monsters, the door appears to face the player no matter which direction it is viewed from. However, the door can only be attacked by way of the actual door openings, and not through any solid wall, even if the player can see through it. The aura or glow of a magical door is only seen when directly in front of the door; from two grid squares away, the door will appear as a normal door or hidden door, as it will when viewed obliquely. The doors behave (and are handled by the program) pretty much like the other monsters, and are usually among the more powerful and dangerous inhabitants of any dungeon level they appear in. They have the same dual attribute score as the regular monsters (and the player) and can be attacked with any sort of weapon. If attacked a special door will fight back, always with spiritual (magical) weapons like fireballs or lightning bolts, regardless of the door's color and the nature or aspect of the maze level it inhabits. The player can retreat from a magical door which has been engaged in combat, under the normal game rules for withdrawal. A combative magical door can be placated, as with any monster, by attacking it with any container of treasure. Since the magical doors never take initiative and never strike first (unlike all other monsters), this act of hurling treasure at the door is an effective, no-risk tactic for evaluating the strength of the door, and the danger it poses. If defeated, the magical door is revealed to be a conventional wall segment with a normal door or a hidden door, with no evidence of the former enchantment. The demon that possessed the door is gone, and there is no further threat to the player, who can proceed normally, and relieve the now accessible room of its prize.

I'll try these out as soon as I have a PC again (mine died and I'm limited to a borrowed Chromebook right now). They look interesting and fun. Going off topic, your TCC has been quite an enjoyable challenge to dive into.

Christmas 1982 - Autumn 1987 >>> My original 2600 VCS, about five years worth of solid play. Then various on-again and off-again periods of playing both authentic hardware and various emulators, over the course of about two decades. Then: Summer 2011 - Present >>> An eBay acquisition, a 2600 VCS four-switch model, another five years of regular enjoyment! I can relate to the original post, though. When I sold my system and games in 1987, I had about 120 cartridges. About half of those I acquired in the first six months of owning my system. So my games library grew quickly, and I think my most important and special memories of playing the Atari 2600 come from those first six months. Not that my subsequent gaming was any less fun, but that first phase was intense!

I have never had much interest in the Flashback products, but as an Atari and Intellivision gamer from the Golden Age I have supported and will continue to wholeheartedly support the efforts to manufacture and market the Flashbacks. (I have helped persuade two of my friends to purchase three Flashback products when they were on the fence about doing so.) The offerings improve with every release, and the Flashbacks are doing some heavy lifting in the effort to not only preserve the brands and games of video gaming's early years but actually rebuild them, introduce them to new players and customers, and give hope that perhaps someday soon Atari (and Intellivision, Colecovision et al?) will become a force to be reckoned with once again. You can't please everyone, we all know that. But any business today faces a customer base which has more leverage than ever. So-called social media facilitates a very effective propaganda machine. AtGames just has to make sure its message is heard, which will probably entail lots of repetition. It also has to be persuasive, and have counter-arguments ready for the dissenters (not tit-for-tat trolling as many businesses seem to go for these days). And within all those negative reactions there sometimes is good information to be mined, such as legitimate criticisms or better ideas. I think the entire Flashback project has done well and keeps getting stronger and better, and I think Bill Loguidice is a big reason to have hope for even better product offerings to come. He's even worn me down: once I get a look at the game list I'm probably going to commit to buying the Flashback 7. The Frogger and Space Invaders updates have me curious, and the idea that I could easily unplug the Flashback and take it with me to visit family and friends (which I wouldn't care to do with my vintage 2600 and its cartridge library) means Atari games could be making appearances at the parties and holiday get-togethers I attend. To Bill, AtGames and Atari: Thank you, and keep up the good work!!!

These days here in East Tennessee Atari and Intellivision cartridges are pretty easy to find. McCay's (a regional dealer in used books, video, games etc.) usually have lots of vintage carts to choose from at each of their two locations. The video game chain stores also have vintage carts in their used bins. My brother is kicking his retrogaming and collecting into high gear and he keeps making amazing discoveries by prowling around stores in Knoxville. The other day he found an Odyssey2 complete-in-box sitting on a store shelf. A few years ago he went into a thrift store in Ohio and found a working, complete-in-box Vectrex with several games. Getting out and exploring can be worth the effort. Twenty years ago around here I bought lots of Atari 2600 games new-in-box from Radio Shack and Toys-R-Us by using their in-store catalogs and by calling stores and asking about what they had in the back, but that's just a memory now. Radio Shack would take orders at the register from the in-store catalog and fulfill from a warehouse in Texas. They shipped directly to the customer's home. Goodwill also used to be a pretty reliable source but not anymore. These days eBay and Craigslist are of course good sources. Etsy might have something occasionally. Exploring online can be just as fruitful as exploring in the real world. But don't forget to ask relatives and old friends if they have anything in the garage or the closet. Sometimes folks forget about something and a reminder can lead them to recall and put you in a position to acquire some goodies. I've picked up video game stuff from co-workers and relatives that way, stuff they had forgotten or had no interest in. And check out garage sales and estate sales. Find ads for those in your local newspaper. You can also visit electronics component distributors or ham radio fests/field days and ask around. Any gathering of people who have an interest in electronics with an emphasis on hands-on work will possibly include folks who have some video game stuff or know someone that does. It's like hunting for or researching anything: if you enjoy meeting people, making friends and asking questions you'll amaze yourself at what you learn and what you find. Just don't be afraid to put forth the effort. Happy hunting!

Maybe a Kickstarter is in order?

No Dodge 'Em, no deal!

Am I wrong or was so-called 3D printing considered for this manufacturing process?

A new current generation Atari console with new, modern updates of classic game titles? The Atari Now (instead of Atari Flashback)? The Atari 10400? Plug and play, $50 price point? Launch titles include Yars Revolution, Ultra Breakout, Megapede, Blasteroids Deluxe, Battlezone: SuperTank, Space Duel 2.0 and Missile Command: Cold Warrior? ...pretty please?

I discovered the art of Kilian Eng a few years ago. One of the first artworks of his I encountered is a piece called "The Table." Among my first thoughts was that it looked to me like a modern conception of the Atari game Warlords. The characters standing behind the chairs could be the game players, and the seated figures are the kings or warlords in the game, waiting to be animated. Or the seated figures could be defeated and deceased, and the standing figures are the "ghosts" you can see in Atari 2600 Warlords after kings have been killed. Certainly not what the artist intended, and naturally the illustration can have many other stories spun from it, but I like seeing one of my favorite old Atari games when I look at it. Does anyone else see what I see? Or something else, even more interesting?

According to Warren Robinett's website, the creator of Adventure for the Atari 2600 has spent the last decade-and-a-half largely working on memristor-based logic circuits and other technologies at HP Labs. Carla Meninsky, who programmed Dodge 'Em and Warlords, is now an intellectual property lawyer. See this forum link for more: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/190172-carla-meninsky-the-lost-interview/ David Crane, of Pitfall! fame, has stayed in the industry as a video game creator and programmer. As noted above, Howard Scott Warshaw (Yar's Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark) is now a psychotherapist. Tom Loughry (AD&D: Treasure of Tarmin for Intellivision) stayed in the industry, as a developer for EA until he developed a disabling repetitive-use injury that made keyboard work for him a thing of the past. Eugene Jarvis (Defender and Robotron: 2084 coin-ops) owns a wine company and is a video game development studio head as well as Game Designer in Residence at DePaul University, according to the Wikipedia entry about him. Carol Shaw (3D Tic-Tac-Toe and River Raid) retired early thanks to her success with River Raid and Activision's more generous and sympathetic compensation of its talent, according to Wikipedia. Dan Oliver has kindly related his tale above. A little searching on the AtariAge forums and on Google will lead to many interviews, articles and wiki pages that will offer further insight. Stories about folks like Jeff Minter (Gridrunner), Bill Hogue (Miner 2049er), Doug Smith (Lode Runner) and others make for very interesting reading.

YES FOR POSTERS! YES FOR POSTERS! YES FOR POSTERS!

For those unaware, Warren Robinett has been beavering away on a book about his masterpiece for the Atari 2600, the game simply titled Adventure. According to his website the e-book should be released this year. Last September I sent him an e-mail to have my name placed on the mailing list for the eventual announcement of the book's completion, and I couldn't resist adding some "fan mail" stuff to the message. Mr. Robinett was kind enough to send me a reply, some of which I will now share as I (and hopefully many other Adventure fans) eagerly await his first-hand account of the genesis of one of the most popular video games ever made. I hope these excerpts will serve as a sort of preview of the book (or perhaps a mini-interview). I gather he is putting the book together on the side as he stays busy with professional engineering work, so patience with the process has been my way of looking at it. ************************ EBM: "Dear Mr. Robinett, I anxiously await your e-book The Annotated Adventure. I like your idea of having the C and assembly versions run parallel on the pages, for comparison's sake. Most important to me is your commentary: I have enjoyed your various writings and lectures concerning the game and I'm eager to learn more. One of my favorite aspects of the game is the translational symmetry of two rooms in the grey dungeon (including the dot room), contrasted with the reflectional symmetry of the majority of rooms in the kingdom. An interesting choice... I wonder if there was a reason behind it. I also enjoy exploring the way the rooms align for all the non-player objects as they travel unhindered by walls. It is fun to discover how these paths devolve into loops, and to map these paths using different methods: graphical, symbolic, numerical, etc. Starting in any given room, and determining which rooms lie along a path of travel in one compass direction, reveals many interesting aspects of the kingdom's layout. As of course you are aware of, some paths of travel are revealed to go from screen to screen in a "circular" pattern i.e. 01-02-03-01-02-03, whereas other paths follow an initially linear pattern that falls into a subordinate "circular" pattern i.e. 01-02-03-04-05-03-04-05. Some paths are lengthy, while others (originating in the gold castle room and the number room [game select screen]) are abbreviated greatly. What I am most eager to learn from you and your e-book is how you made decisions regarding the manner in which the rooms communicate in an architectural sense (ignoring the walls, of course). Some of the reasoning seems easy for me to suss out, but some of it eludes me. Limiting access to the castle rooms is sensible for gameplay reasons. The horizontal loop of the main hallway directly south of the gold castle seems intuitive. Many areas of the kingdom constitute somewhat self-contained realms like this, lending a sense of place to a potentially bewildering layout. But there are some long routes, like moving south from the black castle through the blue labyrinth which ultimately results in a small "circular" route that doesn't revisit most of the screens that preceded it. Was every path like these strategically planned, or are there any "accidental" results that follow from other layout decisions in a natural way?" WR: "One thing I can tell you is that you have analyzed this topic more deeply than I did when making the game. I did make the castle gates the only way in and out of the castle interior regions. And I did try to make regions like the Blue Maze mostly link to themselves (but there had to be at least 2 exits from the Blue Maze, since it stood between the Yellow Castle and the Black Castle). Beyond that, every room had to have 4 links that went somewhere, because a Dragon or the Bat was going to sooner or later cross every edge of every room. If there was an apparent problem, I fixed it. But beyond the foregoing stuff, the precise topology of the game world just sort of evolved, as I added new regions during development. Regarding the 2 rooms that did not have reflectional symmetry in the Catacombs (dark maze) inside the Black Castle, I had an attribute bit in my room-list data structure that controlled which Playfield symmetry was used. I had never used anything but reflectional symmetry up to the point I added this attribute bit to the data structure. I didn't really need the one you call "translational symmetry". But the Atari VCS platform didn't give you much to work with. I was trying everything I could think of to make the game more interesting. It was really quite pitifully boring in its earliest stages. So I added the alternate symmetry in a dark maze so that it would not be instantly obvious that I had the broken the symmetry — it would slowly dawn on the player that those two rooms were different. So my reason was not all that deep. I was just grabbing some low-hanging fruit to add just another little piece of variety to the game." ************************ I believe the forthcoming book has been discussed elsewhere in the forums, but I am writing this to remind everyone about the book and to encourage those who are interested to sign up to Mr. Robinett's mailing list and confirm interest in the project. As I said, it's not like it can be rushed (nor would I want it to be) but making it known that interest is there will no doubt help the work see the light of day in good time.

I pre-ordered three copies. I can't wait to own this book, and I hope the sample pages are an indicator of what is to come. Thank you very, very much for putting this together!

Well, why not? Very tough to narrow down, and the top fifty or so games are very close in ranking for me, but to fix something in amber: 1. Adventure 2. Yars' Revenge 3. Berzerk 4. Stellar Track 5. Mountain King 6. Spacemaster X-7 7. Video Pinball 8. Subterranea 9. Seaweed Assault 10. Halo 2600 Thanks to Miss 2600 for curating this poll and keeping it alive!

I play several old M-Network cartridges in my regular rotation and they work great, and are very reliable. I have plenty of trouble from Parker Brothers and Activision carts, though...